Our Work with Children

Everything we do has just one goal: the sustained well-being of children, especially the most vulnerable.

We work with families, communities, and partners to ensure that children enjoy good health, are educated for life, experience the love of God and their neighbours, and are cared for, protected, and participating.

Our Approaches

Everything we do has just one goal: the sustained well-being of children, especially the most vulnerable.

We work with families, communities, and partners to ensure that children enjoy good health, are educated for life, experience the love of God and their neighbours, and are cared for, protected, and participating.

Emergencies

In disaster situations, children are always the most vulnerable to the effects of malnutrition and disease

World Vision works around the clock to bring hope and relief to children and families whose lives are threatened in the wake of disasters. Thanks to the support of our committed donors, we've helped over 10 million people worldwide- providing food, shelter, water and healthcare.

Responding to global trends

In the past decade the acceleration of urbanisation, growth in the number and intensity of civil conflicts and increasing effects of climate change have presented fresh challenges for disaster management. World Vision’s shift to a more agile, responsive and integrated model of disaster management ensures we can meet the evolving needs of vulnerable children and their communities.

Urbanisation

According to the United Nations Population Fund, more than 50 per cent of the global population was already urban by 2008, with more than one billion people living in slums. The megatrend of urbanisation will continue, with estimates suggesting that by 2050 more than 67 per cent of the world’s population will be city dwellers.

Urban populations, especially children, are particularly vulnerable to risks, with climate change and conflict posing significant threats to the urban poor. Key aspects of social, economic, technological and natural systems function differently in urban areas than in rural or camp settings, where World Vision (and most of the humanitarian community) has developed its response processes, skills and methods.

Due to the density, diversity and dynamism of cities urban systems have specific features. This is evident, for example, in the ways that communities are defined and function, the ways that markets, economic development and employment exist, and the reliance by the private sector and service provision on infrastructure for a range of goods and services.

Conflict

In FY13, over one billion girls and boys lived in countries affected by conflict. Of those, seven million were refugees and four million were internally displaced, 300 million were under five years of age and 250,000 were child soldiers. (ECHO, Children in Conflict, 2014)

Besides being among the many civilian casualties during an armed conflict, children, especially girls, may be orphaned or separated from their families and become heads of households which makes them vulnerable to forced labour, sexual exploitation or recruitment into armed forces.

Children are often malnourished and at risk of death from preventable or curable diseases in environments where basic services are disrupted and livelihoods destroyed. The hardships of life in armed conflicts often force children to leave school. Many never return, even when conflict ends.

Children who have experienced conflict must find ways to cope with their memories of distressing experiences which may well have long-term repercussions and affect their whole life.

World Vision is working to help children and their communities become more resilient in contexts of conflict through solid early warning systems and conflict mitigation measures such as community-level interfaith work and peacebuilding.

We also continue to prepare and implement humanitarian responses relevant to the needs of these children and their communities, and rehabilitation and post-conflict programmes that are sustainable and built on local capacities.

The evolution of our disaster management approach

Integration with development

The reach of World Vision’s global development work provides significant opportunities when it comes to disaster management. Recognising the crucial role of community resilience and disaster risk reduction has grown, we’ve worked to address these areas in our community development models. Programming that explicitly addresses individual and community resilience, early warning, disaster preparedness and mitigation is increasingly part of our work with vulnerable communities.

Cash programming

World Vision uses cash transfers in contexts where goods are locally available, markets are functioning and accessible, beneficiaries are supportive and it’s safe to deliver cash. In these situations cash transfers have significant benefits over traditional distributions, including:

Flexibility: cash enables beneficiaries to choose a more appropriate set of goods and services that better corresponds to their individual priorities, rather than a ‘one size fits all’ in-kind assistance package.

Efficiency: delivering cash avoids the large shipping, storage, transport and distribution costs of in-kind assistance. Cash may also mean that beneficiaries will not be forced to sell, at a large discount, the in-kind assistance they receive in order to meet their wider needs.

Economic impact: transfers inject cash into local markets, with multiplier effects that can stimulate the local economy and help it recover.

Dignity and choice: cash can provide assistance to beneficiaries in a manner that enables them to make decisions about their own welfare in ways that in-kind assistance does not.

The right tools, whether they include a notice board used for communication with communities, or a system that facilitates cash transfers to refugees, have always played an important role in the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian programming.

As technology has advanced, World Vision has continued to adopt and develop tools that contribute to the efficiency, impact and tracking of our work, as well as the work of the broader humanitarian industry. Technology like our ‘Last Mile Mobile Solutions’ has now been adopted by peer agencies including Oxfam, Medair, Save the Children, International Committee of the Red Cross, CARE, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Food for the Hungry and Mercy Corps, improving collaboration and coordination between agencies.

Information management

Coordination and inter-agency collaboration is an essential part of World Vision’s Disaster Management work. We are continually adopting new technologies and developing improved information processes to ensure vital operational information is collected and shared with our partners.

World Vision is member of the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) and, keeping in line with the HAP principles, we are working to be more accountable to communities in our emergency responses.